The Beer Garden: Where Small Things are Huge

Hans Weissgerber III opened a beer garden is Milwaukee’s Estabrook park earlier this month. It’s huge, not the beer garden itself, but the idea of a beer garden in a Milwaukee Park.

Oh to be sure, it’s pretty hard to go to any outdoor event in South Eastern Wisconsin, or all of Wisconsin for that matter, and not find vendors selling beer and brats. Milwaukee’s Summerfest is going on now. Beer and brats are sold there. The Brewers played at Miller Park yesterday. Beer and brats were sold there in addition to those enjoyed at tailgate parties before the game. A little north of Milwaukee there was stock car racing on Singler’s little ¼ Mile oval.  Matt Kenseth narrowly beat out Kyle Busch to win his sixth Slinger National title. I’ve got to believe beer and brats were on menu at that race. A little further north, the ladies will have a professional golfing match, 2012 Woman’s US Open, later this week at Kohler. More beer and brats.

On Saturday there were around 100,000 at Milwaukee’s Summerfest. Over 40,000 watched the Brewers play baseball. But more importantly, on that same Saturday afternoon there were thirty or forty people enjoying a cold glass of beer on a nice summer day at Milwaukee’s new beer garden. Don’t let the size of the crowd fool you.

A standalone beer garden in a Milwaukee County park is in class by itself. Milwaukee hasn’t had one since before Prohibition. And it took Weissgerber six years to convince Milwaukee County officials that is was a good idea. That just shows you how huge it is. I don’t think the Calatrava addition to Milwaukee’s Art Museum took as long to approve. As I recall, residents of the five county metropolitan-area didn’t spend more than three years debating on whether or not to build a $500 million new ball park. Small things like that are as they say “no-brainers” -- easy to call.

Truly big things like beer gardens in county parks take long and careful deliberations, a half of a decade and sometimes longer, before moving ahead.

This isn’t to say the bird-in-flight like, architectural addition to Milwaukee’s lakefront skyline wasn’t big. But in many ways the beer garden is a bigger deal. Here’s why.

Santiago Calatrava is an elite, big dog, international architect. Big dogs carefully choose where to leave their mark, and of all places, Calatrava chose Milwaukee for his United States debut. But he didn’t define Milwaukee. In aggregate, it’s the small quirky things that define a city. Milwaukee’s has a lot of those.

·  Milwaukee has a map store. By itself not a big thing, but Chicago doesn’t have one.

·  Milwaukee has the Rockerbox Block Party. Not a big thing by itself either, just a cool and quirky motorcycle event. People who ride old Kawasaki 500s, Vincent Black Shadows and such show up there.

·  Milwaukee has what can be called a lively theatre community anchored by the Milwaukee Rep. Yet, it’s the Alchemist Theater that ranks number 12 on tripadvisor.com’s top 80 city attractions. I don’t what’s up with that, but it must be way cool.

·  Just north of Calatrava’s bird, there is a small portion of Milwaukee’s lakefront that’s long been taken over by people who like to fly kites.

·  There is a used bookstore in Milwaukee’s airport. Of all the bookstores in all of the world’s airports, the used bookstore in Milwaukee’s might be the nicest.

This list could go on. The point here is that we take place we’re from for granted, and often not too kindly. I’m from Milwaukee. I don’t talk it up much when I’m elsewhere. After all, as most people see it, Milwaukee is just another declining, Upper-mid-west, Great Lakes, “rust belt” city. There's not much happening here -- we're just a beer and brat kind of town. There is no reason to bring that up, other than to evoke sympathy.

Oddly, Calatrava didn’t see “rust belt.” I don’t know for sure what he saw. He could be unusually fond of beer and brats. Or in aggregate, maybe he saw thing that are invisible to us only because they are so familiar.

From that perspective, a beer garden in a Milwaukee County park is a huge. Monumental works of architecture can rise up like an exclamation point and brand a place. On the other hand, County park beer gardens, airport used bookstores and all of those small things define a place. In aggregate, it’s those things that make a place worth branding.

Fish Camp: Foraging & Cherry/Bourbon Ribs

A cabin retreat will unexpectedly take over small bits and pieces of your life. Since building the cabin, more and more I’ve taken to what can only be called foraging for my groceries. And no. This isn’t about dumpster diving.

I spent the weekend at my fishing shack. I did some small maintenance there, but mostly laid back. On the way home, I stopped at a nearby orchard. Tart cherries are in season. I returned home with a farmer’s pint of those and began thinking about some sort of BBQ country ribs with a cherry-bourbon glaze.

Four walls and roof in the woods unexpectedly change other things too. I’ve become a bird watcher. It’s not an altogether bad thing. When I thought to build the cabin, I thought of a simple weekend shelter to camp out in while on fishing trips. I didn’t know I was building hermitage, a base camp for foraging and possibly the best bird watching perch in all of Wisconsin. If the hermitage part of it wasn’t completely unexpected, the foraging and bird watching were.

The cabin is about ten miles east of the Mississippi River, and well within the Mississippi migratory bird flyway. It’s perched on a steep hillside overlooking the Kickapoo River and its grassy floodplain. On my deck, my line of vision is directly midway into the treetops on the floodplain, and the deck is smack dab in the transition area between the floodplain and wetlands, and a hardwood forest. Perfect. I couldn’t have planned it better. I didn’t know that when I built the deck.

Now as for the cabin itself, it’s tiny – a main room, two bunk rooms and a camp kitchen. It’s rustic – no electricity and no plumbing. It is a simple shelter for weekend camping. Throughout Wisconsin, particularly in the North and in the West, there are very simple cabins scattered throughout the woods. They’re used mostly by hunters and fishermen. Mine is mostly a fish shack. The main room is like a big screened in porch. It is nicely ventilated by seven large windows and a patio door. Deer hunter’s like cabins with far fewer windows that are easier to heat.   

I’ve found it’s a place for simple living or maybe, to be more exact, for simply living. It is a place to move a bit closer to the natural environment we occupy, yet so happily pushed aside in the name of comfort. It’s a place to give time for thought – something we like to push aside with any number of mindless distractions. It is a retreat and a hermitage. The degree to which it’s that, it’s also perfect and more so than I had imagined.

But before I learned of those things, I learned about apples. The orchards on the bluffs overlooking Gays Mills are nationally renowned for outstanding apples. There is a weird microclimate that’s wonderfully good for apples, the growers tell me. According to their Web page (link):

“Farmers in the Gays Mills area learned early that the land on both sides of the Kickapoo River offered excellent conditions for apple-growing. In 1905, John Hays and Ben Twining collected apples from eight to ten farmers around Gays Mills for exhibit at the Wisconsin State Fair.

The exhibit won first prize, then went on to capture first honors in a national apple show in New York. This experience prompted the Wisconsin State Horticulture Society to urge a project of “trial orchards” around the state to interest growers in commercial production. The society examined a site on High Ridge and planted five acres with five recommended varieties.

By 1911, the orchard had grown so vigorously that an organization was formed in Gays Mills to promote the selling of orchards (sic). Today, more than a thousand acres here produce apples nationally known for their color and flavor.”

In returning from my cabin through August until November a parade of apples unfolds. More varieties than I could have imagined and certainly more than my grocer would carry.  

The Kickapoo Orchard produces a breathtaking list of at least forty varieties of apples. While some of these are common, most are obscure. The obscure ones tend to be ugly, tiny or obesely huge. Or they are varieties that are particularly good for baking, or for home canned applesauce.

The golden russet is a prime example of an ugly apple. It’s small, about the size of a medium onion, maybe smaller, and has a sort of dingy brown color like the potato with the same name. But they are so good, and they magnificently shine in a simple salad featuring apples, spinach, walnuts and a vinaigrette dressing.

Our grocers mostly want eating apples with eye appeal. The wholesalers who supply them want apples that keep and travel well. Between the two only a few varieties make the cut. Most of those are lacking in character and personality. Like fashion models, often there really isn’t much there. Also like fashion models, I guess, very few are genuinely fresh. Varieties of apples are in their prime for only a short while, though you wouldn’t know this if you only bought apples from a big grocery chain store.

The varieties for sale from the Kickapoo orchard change from week to week. While the apples season is long, the peak season for individual varieties is short. These apples are as fresh as fresh can be. From August through October I return from my cabin with two or three bags of apples, different varieties and share them with friends. From those trips, apple recipes took on a whole new meaning. There is a reason for my fondness for homemade apple sauce heaped upon potato pancakes and a growing fondness for apple cobbler. And there is a reason, too, for the walnut oil and sherry vinegar in my cupboard.

After having been schooled on lesson of apples from the Gays Mills orchards, the trips to and from my cabin have become foraging expeditions. I return home with foods that are very fresh, uniquely outstanding and often exotic: maple syrup almost as darkly brown as coffee; morel mushrooms; turtle meat when the Mississippi River commercial fisherman, who runs the Valley Fish and Cheese in Prairie du Chien (link), has it; and so it goes. I’ve become reluctant to buy fresh tomatoes, except in season and from roadside stands.

On this trip I returned with the cherries, Fountain Prairie skirt steaks and a jar of Wienke’s Market dill spears with onion and garlic. The pickles were as good as all but the very best put up by home canners. I bought them on the way to my cabin at Straka Meats in Plain, Wis. Staka Meats is small town butcher shop that processes locally raised beef and pork. And is often the case with small town butcher shops, it stocks an odd variety of other products that owner is particularly fond of. The Wienke pickles came from another small food processor on the other side of Wisconsin. The Wienke pickle story is a good one, an outgrowth from home canning (full text). I wish more of our food processors were like Straka’s and Wienke’s.  

The modern economy of food production, processing and distribution has pushed many good things aside.  Still, I like foraging and apples fresh from the orchard.

In any case, while I promised skirt steaks and bordelaise and am now suggesting the possibility of turtle soup or a beautiful apples salad, on my last trip tart cherries were in season. It’s something that can be made from fresh cherries for only a few weeks during the year. So BBQ ribs, with a cherry/bourbon glaze, are what it will be. To serve four you will need:      

4 meaty country style pork ribs

¼ cup of olive oil

¼ cup of tart cherry juice concentrate

½ cup of apple cider

1 tablespoon maple syrup

1/3 cup of bourbon (nearly 2 jiggers if that’s how you measure your bourbon)

Cornstarch wash

2 cups of pitted tart cherries cut in half, (Bing cherries will do)

Mix all wet ingredients, except the cornstarch wash, into a marinade, and marinade the ribs for about an hour. Cover the ribs and bake in a 325^o oven for an hour and a half with the marinade. Finish the ribs on a hot grill or under a broiler until nicely browned. (Mine in the picture are charred. It’s best to pay attention during this step.) Reserve the browned ribs in a warm oven 160 – 200^o.

Meanwhile transfer the marinade and pan juices to a sauce pan, add the pitted cherries bring to a boil and thicken into a glaze with a cornstarch wash. (If using Bing cherries cook for a minute or two to soften). Serve the ribs covered in sauce. Baked macaroni and cheese or a macaroni and cheese salad goes very well with the rib. Think of fruit and cheese, they’re perfect complements.

Skirt Steaks: Peasant Food and Grossly Underrated

John Priske recommended skirt steaks, as viable alternative to New York strip or rib eye steaks, both of which were sold out. John and his wife Dorothy operate Fountain Prairie Farms, where they raise Highland beef and operate a bed and breakfast inn.

Their farm is about 30 miles north of Madison, Wis. Their custom raised, slaughtered and aged beef has become popular with Madison foodies. They sell it at the Madison’s farmers’ market and directly to a number of restaurants in the region. They have a hard time keeping up with demand, particularly the demand for traditional steaks.

While visiting them a few years ago, the only steaks he had were skirt steaks. At the time I wasn’t familiar with cut.

“They’re really flavorful,” He said. “You sear them on the grill like a flank steak and thinly slice them across the grain.”

John was right. I’m particularly fond of the short ribs and ox tails he sells. These are peasant cuts of beef. Well the skirt steak is a peasant steak. It’s become my favorite.

Peasant foods often have very honest but nevertheless colorful names attached to them. Sometimes you just know some things are good by these common names. The steak comes from the belly of the beast. It’s one of four diaphragm muscles located between the brisket and the flank. We’re not talking rib eye, New York strip, T-bone or tenderloin.

In New York, the steak house name for this cut of beef is Romanian tenderloin. “Romanian,” in this case, tells us it’s not a tenderloin.  It’s a peasant steak and anything but tender. That’s why when seared to a medium rare it’s served thinly sliced. All the same, it is possibly tastiest steak from a side of beef which for years languished in relative obscurity.

Until the early 1970s, about the only restaurants featuring these steaks were Greek-American, where it was typically offered as a lowly breakfast steak. Otherwise, skirt steaks most often wound up with the other less than prime cuts and ground into hamburger. In the early 70s Mexican cuisine started to find its way into mainstream American dining and hence the skirt steak’s other common name -- fajita. Wikipedia tells us about its more colorful history:

“In Spanish "faja" means belt or girdle; "fajita" is the diminutive form. In original Tex-Mex culinary parlance, fajitas are a dish with roots in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas from a specific cut of meat: skirt steak. . . .

The first serious study of the history of fajitas was done in 1984 by Homero Recio as part of his graduate work in animal science at Texas A&M. Recio was intrigued by a spike in the retail price of skirt steak, and that sparked his research into the dish that took the once humble skirt steak from throwaway cut to menu star. Recio found anecdotal evidence describing the cut of meat, the cooking style (directly on a campfire or on a grill), and the Spanish nickname going back as far as the 1930s in the ranch lands of South and West Texas. During cattle roundups, beef were butchered regularly to feed the hands. Throwaway items such as the hide, the head, the entrails, and meat trimmings such as skirt were given to the Mexican vaqueros (cowboys) as part of their pay. Considering the limited number of skirts per carcass and the fact the meat wasn't available commercially, the fajita tradition remained regional and relatively obscure for many years, probably only familiar to vaqueros, butchers, and their families.”

Call it a cowboy steak if you like, it’s peasant food.  It is one of the few cuts of beef that’s great both for grilling and braising. Above all, it’s held in high regard for its flavor.

Think of a fancy restaurant describing its Romanian beef entre as “Thin slices of Romanian Steak slowly braised in rich mushroom wine sauce with . . .”

In a truly outstanding restaurant, the chef would not hesitate to pan sear a skirt steak in tallow, serve it thinly sliced medium rare nestled in a bed of caramelized root vegetables and topped off with an honest Bordelaise sauce. You get the picture. It’s not the one pictured here.

The picture with this post is from Recipes.Com. (Full Text, and do be sure to hit the side bar for Vegas Strip Steak. It looks a world like a skirt steak to me.) In this well received recipe for “Flank Steak Bordelaise,” the steak used is a less flavorful close cousin to a skirt steak. The sauce is “Bordelaise” in name only. A true bordelaise sauce is a demi-glaze based red wine sauce finished with a thin sheen of butter and diced bone marrow. Tallow, demi-glaze and marrow are far beyond the reach of most restaurants. Ironically, the things of haute cuisine have their foundation in peasant cooking. As for a true bodelaise sauce, it you have time for it, you can make it at home. Plan on spending a day making a good beef stock and reducining it to a demi-glaze.

In short this recipe, while highly rated, comes up short. It’s not a skirt steak and it’s not bordelaise sauce.

The butcher at my local store will occasionally offer skirts steaks. It seems that in Cedarburg, Wis., most consumers are not familiar with this cut of beef. It has become expensive. He doesn’t offer them unless they’re priced right from the packing house.

This weekend I’ll be visiting John and Dorothy Priske. I will buy a few skirt steaks. In a future post I’ll tell you how to serve these up with true bordelaise sauce.

G.K. Chesterton and the Fallen Angels of the Fourth Estate

The voice of the “common informer” is a frontline safeguard against tyranny. As such freedom of speech is rightly enshrined by our constitution as a fundamental human right. Unfortunately, there are no safeguards against the same special interests that corrupt our public institutions to keep them from corrupting our “common informers.”

On that note here are some thoughts of G.K. Chesterton on the fallen angels of the fourth estate. These are from Utopia of Users and other Essays. (Full Text.)

“A long while ago, before all the Liberals died, a Liberal introduced a Bill to prevent Parliament being merely packed with the slaves of financial interests. For that purpose he established the excellent democratic principle that the private citizen, as such, might protest against public corruption.  He was called the Common Informer. . . . Now the word "common" in "Common Informer" means exactly what it means in "common sense" or "Book of Common Prayer," or (above all) in "House of Commons."  It does not mean anything low or vulgar; any more than they do.  The only difference is that the House of Commons really is low and vulgar; and the Common Informer isn't. It is just the same with the word "Informer."  It does not mean spy or sneak.  It means one who gives information. It means what "journalist" ought to mean.  The only difference is that the Common Informer may be paid if he tells the truth. The common journalist will be ruined if he does.”

…………………………

 “Their Load of Lies

Now, why do people in Fleet-street talk such tosh? People in Fleet-street are not fools.  Most of them have realised reality through work; some through starvation; some through damnation, or something damnably like it.  I think it is simply and seriously true that they are tired of their job. As the general said in M. Rostand's play, "la fatigue!"

I do really believe that this is one of the ways in which God (don't get flurried, Nature if you like) is unexpectedly avenged on things infamous and unreasonable. And this method is that men's moral and even physical tenacity actually give out under such a load of lies.  They go on writing their leading articles and their Parliamentary reports. They go on doing it as a convict goes on picking oakum. But the point is not that we are bored with their articles; the point is that they are.  The work is done worse because it is done weakly and without human enthusiasm.  And it is done weakly because of the truth we have told so many times in this book: that it is not done for monarchy, for which men will die; or for democracy, for which men will die; or even for aristocracy, for which many men have died.  It is done for a thing called Capitalism: which stands out quite clearly in history in many curious ways. But the most curious thing about it is that no man has loved it; and no man died for it.”

…………………………

“It always takes a considerable time to see the simple and central fact about anything.  All sorts of things have been said about the modern Press, especially the Yellow Press; that it is Jingo or Philistine or sensational or wrongly inquisitive or vulgar or indecent or trivial; but none of these have anything really to do with the point.

The point about the Press is that it is not what it is called. It is not the "popular Press."  It is not the public Press.  It is not an organ of public opinion.  It is a conspiracy of a very few millionaires, all sufficiently similar in type to agree on the limits of what this great nation (to which we belong) may know about itself and its friends and enemies.  The ring is not quite complete; there are old-fashioned and honest papers: but it is sufficiently near to completion to produce on the ordinary purchaser of news the practical effects of a corner and a monopoly. He receives all his political information and all his political marching orders from what is by this time a sort of half-conscious secret society, with very few members, but a great deal of money.”

 Today, Bloomberg News reported that "Wall Street titans are outearned by media czars." (Full Text)

Training Bra Spices and the Tyranny of Salt: Lessons from a Simple Ragout

I do hope all of the brand name, pricey seasoning salts and rubs are a training bra like introduction to a more robust and full bodied world of flavor. But that’s kind of beside the point, as is the picture posted with this entry. I mean, I’ve promised a ragout and what you see is nothing of the sort.

The chicken is here mostly because the picture turned out reasonably well. It’s here because it too tells a story about the tyranny of salt. It’s a simple one. We are so over salted that good home cooking is constantly threatened with ruin.

For the most part, the foundation for the meals we cook has already been set before we turn on the stove or fire up the grill. We plant and harvest, hunt and gather mostly in our grocery store. Some foods are fresh. Many are not. If we’re not careful that can of condensed cream of mushroom soup, which we might hope to coax and cajole into a delicious Stroganoff sauce, can be our downfall.

A ragout made long ago -- simply with canned tomatoes, tomato sauce, red cooking wine, green peppers, mushroom, an onion, Italian sausage and spices -- turned out so salty as to be inedible. It’s possible I garliced it with garlic salt too. I was young once and foolish. But there is a lesson in it.

Salt is our first spice. It’s our universal spice, and a good thing in moderation. It enlivens flavor. It is a preservative. And importantly our bodies need it. We are physiologically predisposed to like eating things with a dash of salt, and sometimes much more that simple dash. The salted glass is important part of what makes a margarita a margarita after all.

Salt makes things universally tasty without undue controversy. A can of tomato sauce seasoned simply with salt will offend no one. The same cannot be said of tarragon for example, which if found regularly spicing cans of generic tomato sauce might be offensive to some and almost universally cursed, as in “my god, why can’t they make tomato sauce without adding tarragon.”

So the good people who make canned tomato sauce season it simply with salt. The same is true of the good people who can the tomatoes, bottle the cooking wine and make the Italian sausage. They make things that are tasty to all and offensive to none.

Yet trying to make a savory sauce with tarragon using these basic ingredients only solicits a different curse. “My god, why can’t they make a simple tomato sauce without all the salt?” Too much salt can also be offensive.

In taking all of these things and adding them together to make the stew, we pile salt upon salt upon salt. Should we go so far as to let the stew simmer and reduce it to a sauce that clings to the pasta, we will have made a sauce so salty as to choke a horse. In short, our pantries are lorded over by an army of well intentioned tyrants seeking to satisfy us mostly with salt. Their V-8 juice is a wonderful beverage. As braising liquid for making goulash, it’s positively poisoned with salt.  

(Though, I do know many who like things this way and who will shake more salt on anything served even before the first bite. Not a jar of dried tarragon will be found on their spice shelf. In fact very few spices will be found on their spice shelves. Those that do are mostly some sort of spiced salt. Garlic salt comes to mind. And small industries have arisen from the mixing of vast quantities of salt with small quantities of other spices. They create extremely profitable brand name seasoning salts and rubs. These have their place. Hot, freshly fried potato chips, served with a variety of seasoning salts are delicious. Though it’s better to home mix a seasoning salt for a specific dish, least the spice rack becomes overrun with them.)

The best advise is to buy "no salt added" or "low sodium" products when stocking the pantry with staples. Under no circumstances buy that which is labeled "cooking wine."
It has been adulterated horribly with salt so that it can be sold as a generic cooking ingredient rather than an alcoholic beverage. The wine used for cooking should be a pleasant beverage in it's own right.

Now to the chicken in the picture, here is the story behind it. The first question of the day always is what’s for supper. The answer that day was a Cornish game hen in the freezer. The rest of the answer came from other things at hand when it came time to cook the thing. There is no hard and fast recipe here. Just an outline of how this delicious dish came to be.

In the refrigerator there was a fresh pineapple and a green pepper. On hand were a bag of onions, a bottle of soy sauce, canned low sodium chicken broth, pineapple juice, a variety of curries, vinegars and rice. In all, I was good to go.

One six ounce can of pineapple juice, about two ounces of rice vinegar, the same with soy sauce and generous teaspoon of Thai curry paste became a marinade. The salt in this dish is from the soy sauce. The hen was cut in two with the ribs and backbone removed, then soaked in the marinade for about an hour.

While that was soaking, I seeded can quartered the pepper, cut a few large chunks of pineapple, peeled and cut two small onions in half then skewered these for the grill. I roasted the hens on a covered grill in a pan with marinade for about forty minutes, then added the skewered vegetables and more liquid to roasting hen (a little low sodium chicken broth). I let the whole business bake in the covered grill for another half hour. Meanwhile, I started the rice.

When the rice was done, I seared the hen over the open flame for about a minute per side and removed it to a platter with the grilled vegetables. I thickened the pan juices into a mild sweet-sour curry glaze with a cornstarch wash. I snapped a quick photo, divided the rice, roasted game hen and roasted vegetables to two plates. Covered all with the glaze and Rita and I feasted on a four star Cornish hen dinner. 

Now, back to the subject of salt. The trick is to know where it’s coming from. In cooking the hen, it came from the soy sauce. The same is true with many things and rightly so: bacon, sauerkraut, soup base and bouillon cubes. In many other things it is unnecessarily so.

In the following ragout recipe, there is enough salt in the Italian sausage to season the dish.    

A good Italian sausage sparkles with traditional Italian seasoning, plus – and this plus is huge – caraway. Unfortunately, good Italian sausage will not likely be found at a typical grocery store. The Italian sausage there is mildly spiced with traditional Italian seasoning and void of caraway. It will be heavily seasoned with salt to make up for the flavor that is otherwise lacking. It appeals to most everyone and is spiced in a way to offend no one. Sausage seasoned with caraway puts some people off. Subsequently, commercial sausage makers are reluctant to make it that way.

The following recipe builds upon the goodness and shortcoming of the sausage – abundant in salt, stingy with traditional Italian spices and silent on caraway. 

For this ragout for four you will need:

1 lb Italian sausage links

26 oz box of chopped tomatoes

8 oz fresh mushrooms, cut in half if small or into quarters if large

¾ green pepper diced

1 medium onion diced

½ cup of dry red wine

2 Tbs olive oil

2 Tbs Italian seasoning

1 tsp minced garlic

1 ½   tsp caraway seed

1 tsp oregano

1 tsp basil

2 bay leaves

8 ounces of uncooked Rotini

Tomato paste if needed

Salt and Pepper to taste

Grated Parmesan and/or Romano cheese (preferably fresh)

In a deep skillet precook the Italian sausage links in the olive oil until firm. Remove pan from heat. When the links are cool enough to handle cut into bite sized pieces. Return the pan to the burner and continue to brown the sausage. Add the mushroom and garlic and continue to sauté until the mushrooms are lightly browned. Add the tomatoes, red wine and spices bring to a boil and then reduce to simmer.

Pre-boil the Rotini to soften slightly, then drain and add to the skillet with the diced onion and green pepper, add liquid if needed (wine or chicken broth). Continue to simmer until pasta and green pepper are cooked al dente. Adjust seasoning. If necessary thicken sauce with tomato paste.

Serve generously topped with grated Parmesan and Romano cheese.   

Olga's Ukraine: September 1941

In writing a family history one cannot ignore the larger history of the time and place. The time and place of a portion of Olga’s history was Zhytomyr, Ukraine, from 1929 until 1943. Most of us have the wonderful blessing to live mundane lives through unremarkable times. We have the luxury to obsess and prattle on about the making of a fine pot of borsch. Olga’s borsch is simple. It’s bean soup with beets, cabbage and whatever. In September of 1941, I’m sure all kinds of cooks were simmering pots of borsch in Zhytomyr. I'm also sure none remember how it was made or wrote down a recipe. In Olga’s Ukraine other things were going on.

In the City of Zhytomyr, according to Wendy Lower, in Nazi Empire Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine: “On 10 September 1941, Zhytomyr’s Feldcommandantur met with staff from Einsatzgruppe C, and they decided “definitively and radically to liquidate the Jewish community.” . . . The final blow came in the early morning hours of 19 September 1941: “Starting at 4:00 o’clock [a.m.], the Jewish quarter was emptied after having been surrounded and closed the previous evening. . . .3,145 Jews were registered and executed.”

Following the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in Zhytomyr, the SS troops looted the most valuable Jewish personal property and currency. What was left behind amounted to nearly thirty tons of linens, clothing, shoes and household goods and was “donated” to the Nazi “People’s Welfare Agency.” In the remains of the ghetto, a prison camp housed 240 skilled Jewish laborers who were later killed in 1942.

Olga remembered.

The entire awful spectacle of the Nazi “Final Solution” rapidly surrounded her. Within less than two months, what began in July as a hopeful dawn of liberation marked openly by her Christian baptism along with that of 30 young friends, became in September a part of one of the darkest episodes of human history.

When asked about the Holocaust, she paused and thought for long while, then said: “My best friend was Jewish girl. They lived across the street. One morning we got up. The whole family was gone. They were simply gone.”

It was as if a kaleidoscope of memories flashed through her mind and froze on the singular, black, almost vacant memory, the one that was the most painful. In the pause and in the brief answer that followed, there was an unspoken footnote. It said, the horror of what happened is beyond comprehension, and something not to be recalled.

Less than two weeks following the slaughter of Zhytomyr’s Jews, seventy or eighty miles to the west another girl kept a diary. She kept track of the events as they unfolded, still beyond comprehension, but not benevolently draped by the gauze time layers upon memory. Iryna Khoroshunova, on September 29, vividly wrote this from Kiev:

“We still don’t know what they did to the Jews. There are terrifying rumors coming from the Lukianivka Cemetery. But they are still impossible to believe. They say the Jews are being shot . . . Some people say that the Jews are being shot with machine guns, all of them. Others say that sixteen train wagons have been prepared and that they will be sent away. Where to? Nobody knows. Only one thing seems clear: all their documents, things, and food are confiscated. Then they are chased into Babi Yar and there . . . I don’t know. I only know one thing. There is something terrible, horrible going on, something inconceivable, which cannot be understood, grasped or explained.”

A few days later with the uncertainty dispelled, she wrote:

“Everybody is saying now that the Jews are being murdered. No, they have been murdered already. All of them, without exception – old people, women and children. Those who went home on Monday have also been shot. People say it in a way that does not leave any doubt. No trains left Lukianivka at all. People saw cars with warm shawls and other things driving away from the cemetery. German “accuracy.” They already sorted the loot! A Russian girl accompanied her girlfriend to the cemetery, but crawled through the fence from the other side. She saw how naked people were taken toward Babi Yar and heard shots from a machine gun. There are more and more such rumors and accounts. They are too monstrous to believe. But we are forced to believe them, for the shooting of the Jews is a fact. A fact which is starting to drive us insane. It is impossible to live with this knowledge. The women around us are crying. And we? We also cried on September 29, when we thought they were taken to a concentration camp. But now? Can we really cry? I am writing, but my hair is standing on end.”

The massacre at Babi Yar was a different sort of explosion than the many explosions that shook Kiev. Kiev fell on September 19. The German army advanced into a city that remained largely intact. The main battles had occurred in Kiev’s outskirts and the surrounding countryside. By the time it came to a close the German military saw no need to shell the city itself. However, beginning on September 24 and lasting nearly two days, a series of explosions wracked the city’s center setting nearly 250 urban acres ablaze. The fire took another three days to put out. Between 10 and 50 thousand city residents were left homeless.

From the outset, both the Germans and residents of Kiev were outraged. According to Karel Berkhoff, in Harvest of Despair, already on the first day of the explosions angry crowds began looking for culprits. In the following days, the blame was increasingly placed on Kiev’s Jewish population. Even though the fire left many Jews homeless, the German occupiers found blaming the Jews was a convenient non sequitur. It was a conclusion that many Kiev’s residents were more than willing to buy into. As Berkhoff explains, they “feared a terrible German revenge and wanted a scapegoat.”

No one could have imagined the wrath that would follow: not Kievans; not Kiev’s large Jewish minority; and not the solders of the German Sixth army. As for the locals, it’s reasonable to assume they expected reprisals along the line of what had occurred in Zhytomyr, where a hundred Jewish men were rounded up and executed as Bolshevik saboteurs in July, 1941. Zhytomyr is about eighty mile east of Kiev. News likely spread through the grapevine, but if so only slowly. The residents of Kiev apparently had no knowledge of the genocidal work in Berdychiv and Zhytomyr.

  

On Sunday, September 28, posters were plastered throughout the city ordering all Jews to appear at an assembly point near the Kiev’s train yards on the following day before eight o’ clock. They were to take their documents, money, valuables, and warm clothing with them. The posters warned that and Jews who failed to show up would be shot, as well as anyone caught looting vacated Jewish homes and apartments.

According to Berkhoff’s account, the SS spread rumors that the Jews were being assembled to concentrated into a ghetto and put to work, or alternatively to be sent to forced labor camps in Germany or to be held for exchange with German prisoners of war.

Instead, on the following Monday and Tuesday all of the Jews who followed the German directive were slaughtered. No fewer than precisely 33,771 according to Nazi records. Berkhoff notes that the number does not include non-Jewish spouses and other relatives who died along with them. Overall, according to most sources, the two day death toll was in the range of 50 to 60 thousand. The Jewish population in Kiev when the German arrived was around 110,000-130,000. During the following months the Nazis continued to use the Babi Yar ravine as a killing site. Soviet sources claim as many 100,000 to 200,000 people were killed there before the before Kiev was retaken by the Red army in November 1943.

It’s stunning how quickly the Nazi killing machine evolved in Ukraine. When the Germans entered Kiev on September 19, as elsewhere in Ukraine they were cautiously welcomed as liberators. Unlike Zhytomyr, the honeymoon was short. Figuratively, it ended the morning after the wedding night. Any hope that the German occupation would be less harsh than Soviet rule was almost immediately squelched. Within two years, Nazi genocide would be nearly complete, not in just in Ukraine but across all Europe.

Contemporary historians have, in trying to answer how the Nazi slaughter could unfold so quickly and so thoroughly, looked hard for what role civilian collaboration played. But, its speed left little room for collaboration, aside from a relative handful of puppets who wormed their way into senior civilian administrative positions and a larger group of thugs enlisted into local police units.

The genocide as it unfolded was primarily a Nazi German export accompanying the invasion. Herman Goring, Hitler’s right hand, in an order dated July 31 authorized SS chief Reinhard Heydrich “to make all necessary preparations” for the “total solution to the Jewish question” in all areas under German occupation. He was instructed to submit comprehensive plan outlining the roles of all necessary government organizations in the “final solution of the Jewish question.”

Until August Lower writes: “. . . the transition from killing male Jews to killing women and children did not occur automatically. . . According to the testimony of the former commander of Einsatzkammando 5 (EK5), Erwin Schulz, he was summoned in early August from Berdyschiv to Zhytomyr, where his superior, Otto Rasch, informed him that the higher-ups were displeased because the SS-police was not acting aggressively enough against the Jews, in particular, by not killing women and children.”

In Western Europe, by comparison, the population tacitly acquiesced to Nazi anti-Semitism, nearly all the way to the rail yards leading to Auschwitz. It’s a big difference and one not entirely overlooked. At the 65^th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre, in 2006, Holocaust survivor and then Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau in his address wondered:

“Maybe I am not a historian, but maybe, say, this Babi Yar was also a test for Hitler. If on September 29 and September 30, 1941 Babi Yar may happen and the world did not react seriously, dramatically, abnormally, maybe this was a good test for him. So a few weeks later in January 1942, near Berlin in Wannsee, a convention can be held with a decision, a final solution to the Jewish problem. We are a problem, of course. Maybe if the very action had been a serious one, a dramatic one, in September 1941 here in Ukraine, the Wannsee Conference would have come to a different end, maybe.

We kept silent. . .  The world became a torch of fire, of hatred, lakes of bloodshed, because of that silence. And before that silence in the ‘30s what did we see? What did we hear? The voice was: “It will not happen, it can’t be. The world will not enable such a horror. The world is too cultured to enable that horror.”

January 1942, following a conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, is generally recognized as formal beginning of the “Final Solution.” It was at Wannsee where the plans to deport Jews from German controlled Western Europe and North Africa to Eastern European death/work camps were outlined.

In Western Europe the Holocaust evolved gradually over a course of years. In Ukraine the “final solution” stormed in quite literally behind the blitzkrieg of tanks. The atrocities of the Holocaust cannot be underscored or diminished, yet in very real way all of Ukraine was traumatized.

Artisan Oatmeal Cookies: The Economy of Affection & Another Slice of Wendell Berrry

This afternoon I am making a batch of my Aunt Betty’s famous oatmeal cookies. They’re the best.

They are the only cookie she baked, as I recall. She was a childless woman with great love for her nieces and nephews, of which she had many. I believe she baked these cookies for us with great affection. She would bring a neatly wrapped box of them our house during the Christmas season. And other times too.

Today, we reserve the word “artisan” to things that are made with great affection: affection for the thing being made; affection for the things it is made from; and affection for the person(s) for whom it is made. Contemporary logic tells us affection is subjective, outside the realm of material economic, industrial and technological relevance. It is a romantic attribute, far beyond the reach of statistical analysis. It is something which certainly has no place at table of serious economic discussion.

Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky tells me that’s not true. Closer to home, Aunt Betty’s famous oatmeal cookies tell me the same. With Aunt Betty’s cookies the proof is in the eating.

Affection and imagination are in fact the glue that holds the human economy together – affection for place; affection for family and household; affection for neighbors and community; and affection for work. Place, household, community and work are the fundamentally real and materially concrete cornerstones of the human economy. Affection is the glue and mortar.

The other economic things – markets, finance and technology – are useful abstractions. They are luxuries and artifacts, three or four generations removed from their source, a source which the modern industrial economy has all but smothered.

Wendell Barry recently addressed the subject, upon which Christopher Orlet observed: “After 2012 Jefferson Lecturer Wendell Berry, of Port Royal, Kentucky, received a standing ovation, the chairman of the National Endowment for Humanities Jim Leach rose to remind the audience that Mr. Berry's words did not reflect the official policy of the U.S. government. -- Like we needed to be reminded.” (Full Text)

In part here is what Mr Berry had to say:

“The term “imagination” in what I take to be its truest sense refers to a mental faculty that some people have used and thought about with the utmost seriousness. The sense of the verb “to imagine” contains the full richness of the verb “to see.” To imagine is to see most clearly, familiarly, and understandingly with the eyes, but also to see inwardly, with “the mind’s eye.” It is to see, not passively, but with a force of vision and even with visionary force. To take it seriously we must give up at once any notion that imagination is disconnected from reality or truth or knowledge. It has nothing to do either with clever imitation of appearances or with “dreaming up.” It does not depend upon one’s attitude or point of view, but grasps securely the qualities of things seen or envisioned.

I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.

... The word “affection” and the terms of value that cluster around it—love, care, sympathy, mercy, forbearance, respect, reverence—have histories and meanings that raise the issue of worth. We should, as our culture has warned us over and over again, give our affection to things that are true, just, and beautiful. When we give affection to things that are destructive, we are wrong. A large machine in a large, toxic, eroded cornfield is not, properly speaking, an object or a sign of affection.” (Full Text)

With that, here’s the recipe for Aunt Betty’s oatmeal cookies. All the ingredients are listed, but affection. It can neither be measured nor mixed, but in the making of them it’s implicit. That’s why they’re so good. For these beauties you will need:

                ½ cup butter

                ½ cup margarine*

                1 cup white sugar

                1 cup brown sugar

                1 ½ teaspoons vanilla

                1 tablespoon molasses

                2 eggs

                1 ½ cups flour

                1 teaspoon baking soda

                1 teaspoon salt

                3 cups oatmeal

                1 cup finely chopped walnuts

Cream butter and margarine, gradually add the sugars and blend well. Add the vanilla, molasses and eggs one at a time. Mix well. Sift together the flour, baking soda and salt. Gradually add into the mixture. Fold in the oatmeal and nuts. Divide dough into 3 parts. Shape each into 2” rolls. Refrigerate overnight.*

Cut the rolls into ½” thick slices and bake in a 350^o oven for 12 minutes.

*Notes: I use all butter & rather than rolling the dough into logs, I simply drop tablespoon size dollops of dough directly on the cookie sheets.